Wisteria-clad north London laid bare

Thursday 16 January 2014 16:23 BST

Completion by Tim Walker (Heinemann, £14.99)

Clever idea: Tim Walker’s adroit debut novel tells the story of a scattered London family through their relationship to their Highbury Hill home. This is a story of the rampant property mania that dominates the national conversation and an acute satire on urban, First World problems. It’s wittily done, and Walker, who is 33 and the Independent’s LA correspondent, imagines himself equally confidently into the minds of a rich retiree, an expat mum and a Shoreditch hipster. I worry slightly that his picture of London today is so timely it may quickly date: but then, the property problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

Pen and Jerry are young “creatives” — she a graphic designer, he a thrusting adman — when they cheaply buy and lovingly restore a rambling Victorian house in the Eighties. The house inspires Pen to write a series of children’s books based on the lives of their two children, sober Isobel and needy Conrad.

As property prices soar, dip and then go stratospheric, the family ages and fragments: Jerry to a second family and a second divorce; Pen to a marriage that gets her a house in France; Isobel to arid, air-conditioned motherhood in the plastic Mammon of Dubai; and Conrad to that tribe of bearded, fixie-riding poseurs with ill-defined internet or DJ jobs in east London. Over them all the house looms — as a cash cow, a monument, a talisman or a burden — until it brings the family back together for a dramatic denouement involving the modern homeowner’s worst nightmare.

Walker’s characters are fully fleshed. Indeed, the story of Pen in France could almost be a separate, self-contained story, part romance, part comic thriller. There are lots of nice touches: Jerry’s beloved, symbolic vintage Lotus is so mechanically erratic he can’t drive it at night or park it on a slope; Conrad’s outfits, bicycle components and hairstyle decisions are beadily, meticulously itemised; Isobel’s icy rootlessness is so well described she is the most vivid character.

Walker notes the importance of wisteria as a signifier of north London gentrification: “social climbers”. He writes a love scene centred on a Le Creuset butter dish that simultaneously evokes Joyce’s Ulysses and lays down a gauntlet for the judges of the Bad Sex Award. He also inserts a clunky speech about how the baby boomers screwed Generation Y into the least convincing character’s mouth, but thankfully it’s only once. This is a proper London novel, and properly good fun.